Christmas mail

[petronia]

fantabulous, your card arrived. ^_^ ametatsu, your card and package idem - I am indeed having fun correlating the sketches with the characters. XD (Sometimes I feel visual artists always have one up on writers: words are just words but pictures are real.) Also, BPAL ♥!

Last night I opened all the imps in my room and sniffed each one, then picked the one I liked best to try. XD

Venice
A complex, voluptuous scent that captures the robust beauty and of the Italian Renaissance: lemon, red currant, wisteria, red rose petals, heady jasmine, Florentine orris root, waterlily, red sandalwood, violet plum, and violet leaf.

In the bottle and wet this smells like "fruity jasmine" - the lively lemon/red currant top note is very present. I expected the complex florals to be a bit heady and cloying but the effect is bright and sweet: thinking about it wisteria, waterlily and jasmine are all refreshingly scented flowers. I really like jasmine, and cheerful citrus perfumes like Eau d'Hadrien or Clarins Eau Dynamisante, so that's what convinced me to start with this one. XD

After I'd had it on my skin for five minutes (I was typing with my wrists not particularly close to my face, but near a warm lamp) I started... smelling... fruit. But really. It was like, "Hmm, fruity... red currant... red currant... WHOA PLUMS."

There's a Guerlain perfume, dating from 1919, called Mitsouko. I don't actually like the bottle scent very much but discovered through application that it has a lovely drydown only describable as "sun-warmed peaches". And not that bath-gel/sour-candy plasticky peach scent either; literally golden and fuzzy, like standing in an orchard on a late summer afternoon, sniffing a ripe peach you just plucked off the tree. Venice does something very similar, but instead of peaches there are plums, rounded out by roses and violets. It smells rich and juicy, almost wine-like, but that's probably just because the last time I got a noseful of red currant and plum notes off anything I was likely getting drunk on merlot. Cheerful associations all around. XD The name is completely apposite: the bottle scent is pale gold (I thought of the Duchess Tremontaine) but the developed scent is pure Venetian red. If you told me the Venus d'Urbino wore only this to pose for Titian I'd believe you.

I could wallow in this stuff happily. I think I might order a larger bottle; it's actually quite subtle on my skin, unlike Oberon which creates a perfumed-cloud effect, which would encourage me to use more of it. XD XD

While I'm here I'm going to make another pitch for Lush's Godiva shampoo bar, which is my new Favorite Thing Ever. It cleans just like Hybrid (the black licorice one), but according to the Lush cleric it has three conditioning ingredients to Hybrid's one, and it smells like JASMINE not licorice. Note that I capitalize. The website also lists ingredients like ylang ylang, cypress and gardenia, but essentially you have to be a jasmine fan. Leave it on a soap dish and you're hit in the face with WHOA JASMINE every time you open the bathroom door. If you have one of those little sieve things for catching hair before it falls down the drain, you find little white jasmine flowers in it after you shower. But it's not the in-your-face scent of the bar itself that's the thing of beauty, it's the scent it leaves in your hair afterward: light and maddening and as close as you can come in a Montreal winter to buying a jasmine flower bracelet from a street vendor.

...As beeblebabe said the Lush clerics seem insane but there's seriously something in the product that makes you want to sl0re. XD I've literally been fantasizing about pushing this stuff onto other people. Maybe I'll go on the Yamane Ayano comm and claim this is what Feilong uses on his hair. I'd believe it, I still laugh at Takaba's-friend-Kou's logic in that one - not "He's so pretty, is he a model?", but "He smells really nice, is he a model?"

Comments

[beeblebabe.livejournal.com]

I'm currently making frequent crawls of the Lush website and just know I'm going to be back in there on Monday getting that damnable Cynthia Sylvia Stout shampoo, because yes, I do want my hair to smell like really good beer. ...And some kind of conditioner. ...and maybe a buttercream to get my hands through the winter. And maybe... DAMN IT!

[fantabulous.livejournal.com]

Ah good! =D

[arboretum]

♥! Glad you got it all right - all my mail to Canada seems to be arriving incredibly fast (meanwhile, domestic mail is taking upwards of 2-3 weeks, which is just weird).

Venice is nice, isn't it? :D I've really liked BPAL's jasmine blends so far. I actually stopped by the Lush store near me after all the nice things you've been saying about it (I'm such a lemming! I never even knew it existed before), and they gave me a free Godiva shampoo... unfortunately, it must just be something about me and my body chemistry or something, but one use of Godiva caused me to walk around with a cloud of heavy, heavy jasmine hanging around my head for about 4 days afterwards -- it was kind of scary. XD That said, I did buy another shampoo bar from them (Seanick, which I chose because I liked the color, and because by the time the store attendant finished with me, I really couldn't remember which shampoo spiel went with which shampoo.), and anyway, I'm really enjoying that one.

[petronia.livejournal.com]

Ahaha, yeah, it's definitely in your face. XD I'm actually pretty horrid with perfumes, either I don't wear any or I wear knockout amounts. I find blowdrying gets rid of the jasmine pretty efficiently though.

Venice is lovely. I've tried a couple of the others and will do writeups shortly. XD

[calintz.livejournal.com]

So far I've only used the Waving Not Drowning bath bomb from LUSH and OMG it was love. I nearly fell asleep in the tub. ♥

I wish I could predict what the various components of BPAL oils will do on my skin. >_> Jasmine seems particularly shady - in one blend it's okay, in another it's I PUNCH YOU IN THE FACE. Same goes with the citrus/tea blends that I usually work well with. Bah. (Oh yeah, if you ever find anything you want from the list of imps that I need to get rid of, feel free to let me know.)

BTW the Ulrich Schnauss track I downloaded from the other post = ♥! As is the DJ Ran mix, except we all knew that already. :)